


The Dark One and the Beast

by Eilinelithil



Series: Lover's Leap [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fun but serious, Snark, fairy curses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25694938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eilinelithil/pseuds/Eilinelithil
Summary: The weather has taken a serious and unseasonal turn for the worst and Rumplestiltskin is missing. When Belle finally locates him, he has fallen foul of a 'disagreement' with a self proclaimed, powerful occultist /and/ a fairy curse.
Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold
Series: Lover's Leap [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863370
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	The Dark One and the Beast

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first AU-gust fic, and the prompt was Fantasy. Further inspiration came from Reedsy
> 
> Incidentally, the series title is a play on Quantum Leap, as is the entire premise of the series.

The Dark Castle seemed a little darker these days. Perhaps it was that fall was marching toward winter, and the nights drawing in. Maybe it was that the weather, of late, had been… well, to say it had been less than ideal harvest weather would be an understatement. Belle hadn’t any other choice than to go out into the garden in wind and rain, and foggy days that seemed never to reach full daylight. Or perhaps it was because it was getting harder to remember the last time she had seen Rumplestiltskin.

Not that she had actually searched, nor that he hadn’t been away on other occasions, for days at a time, but this time she had a bad feeling about his absence. Perhaps _that_ was down to the aforementioned and rapidly deteriorating conditions in and around Rumple’s demesne, or perhaps it had something to do with the fact that one morning, she came into the Great Hall to clean out the fireplace before it lit itself for the day, and found a new item of furniture between the two chairs that graced the hearth.

At first she didn’t think much of it, but the longer it was there, the more she felt drawn to it for reasons she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t that it was dusty, it wasn’t that there were marks on it - unless you counted the strange symbols that seemed etched into the wood in the middle of the table - for it was neither, it was just… as though something was calling to her.

…or someone.

On the third morning, when she came upstairs in near darkness - Rumple still hadn’t given her a proper bedroom even after all the time she had been with him - she bypassed the kitchens, skipped breakfast, and went straight to the Great Hall. There, she sat in one of the two large chairs; luxuriated in its comfort if she were honest, and didn’t even bother to clean the fireplace. She actually felt a perverse kind of pleasure in her rebellion as the fire sprang to life, framed by the huge mantle. She found her eyes drawn to the amber goblet standing in the middle of it making a dust void of its own.

As the morning stretched on, that knowledge became a kind of frustration, since she’d been _told_ not to touch his magical things and she knew for a _fact_ that the goblet held magic. She knew it by the fairy script that to the untrained eye would simply have looked like a decorative border round the base of the stem. As the frustration turned to _irritation_ of course she had no one else to blame but Rumple, and where in the name of the gods _was_ he anyway?

“Where _are_ you, Rumplestiltskin!” she harangued the empty air.

_Finally!_

The answer came out of nowhere, in his usual nasal, sarcastic snark and Belle’s head turned first one way and then the other, expecting him to materialize at any second. He didn’t.

 _You know… if I thought it was going to take you_ this _long to realize this weather wasn’t ‘natural’ I would have been far less subtle about it_.

“Where _are_ you?” she repeated again, this time lacking in irritation and increased in concern.

_Look down, dearie._

She did, looking at the floor at her feet.

 _No, no, no!_ She could almost hear him waving his hand in dismissal of her effort. _Up a little._

She lifted her gaze, her eyes darting one way and another, expecting at any moment to catch sight of the tight brown leather of the outfit she had last seen Rumplestiltskin wearing.

Something about the color made her eyes stray to the table between the two chairs and she wondered - not without some amount of returning irritation - why Rumplestiltskin was playing such games with her She slipped from the comfort of the chair onto her knees so that she could peer under the low table, ready to catch sight of Rumplestiltskin in all his impishness.

 _Oh, for goodness sake, girl! Must I do everything? The table… the_ table _!_

“I have a _name!_ ” she snapped back.

 _Yes, and I’ll_ use _it when you use the brains the gods gave a chicken!_

Almost growling at his rudeness, Belle sat back on her heels and timidly lay her hand on the tabletop, feeling a strange kind of vibration humming through her fingers.

His irritated sarcasm switched in an instant to his playful laughter. _Good… very good… now what comes next, Belle._ Then crooning he added, _Remember how to summon the Dark One?_

“Rumplestiltskin…” she began, softly at first, but the second time, as the humming in her fingers increased, she declaimed, “Rumplestiltskin…”

_…Yesss…_

“Rumplestiltskin!”

The world around her shifted, and instead of the Dark Castle, she found herself inside the whorl or the knot of a piece of wood.

* * *

“Well, _that’s_ not supposed to happen,” Rumplestiltskin said, frowning as Belle turned to face him. Frowning was all he could do, embedded as he was in the walls of his wooden prison.

“What…?” Belle stammered, “How—?”

“Oh, it’s easy really,” he snarked, anticipating what all the stuttering was about, then raised his free hand at the wrist to point in her direction. “It’s _your_ fault.”

“My fault!” his maid’s question held entirely too much indignation for his liking.

“Well, if you’d _told_ me what the fairy incantation around the bottom of the goblet said, I would _never_ have touched it, let alone _drank_ from the wretched thing! Damned interfering _gnats!_ ”

“Oh, no!” Belles hands flew to her hips. “You’re not putting this on me. _You’re_ the sorcerer. You’re the Dark One, so don’t tell me you couldn’t feel the magic on it… and _fairy_ magic at that!”

“Well…” Rumplestiltskin squirmed verbally, and then finally conceded, “All right. Fine… perhaps not _all_ your fault.”

“Rumplestiltskin, I swear—” She stepped towards him, hands still on her hips but broke off, her eyes snapping to his side, where the other inhabitant of their ligneous prison stood immobile within a transparent shimmer of purple energies. “Who’s that?”

Rumplestiltskin huffed.

“That, dearie, is the reason I could only manipulate _nature_ like some toothless dryad,” he snapped, pouring a great deal of disgust into the word ‘nature.’

“ _That_ ,” Belle emphasized the word not only with her voice, but with the finger she pointed, not at the other figure, but at Rumplestiltskin himself, “is a person, not a thing.”

“ _That_ ,” Rumple mimicked Belle’s tone, but added in his own indignation, “Is a drug addled egomaniac who calls himself _The Beast_ , and is a wannabe Dark One. So much so that the stupid fairy magic dropped me _right_ into his idiotic ritual in some forest by his home. So you’ll forgive me my less-than-impressed attitude. Damnable drama queen!”

Belle muttered something under her breath that Rumplestiltskin was certain was not complimentary, so tapped the toe of his free foot against the timber floor.

“Well?” he said expectantly. “Are you _going_ to get me out of here or just stand around gawping?”

“Oh, definitely the gawping,” Belle said and folded her arms across her chest. “At least until you tell me who he is, and _how_ the two of you ended up as… as… a coffee table!”

“We had a disagreement, of course,” he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Speaking of which, be a dear and take that dagger from his hand.”

“Why?”

“It’s mine,” he snapped, then more playfully he added, “And you know how I feel about my ‘things’.”

He raised an eyebrow, expectantly, and Belle sighed.

“Fine!” she snapped, and all but stomped over to the other man, before gingerly dipping her hand into the shimmering around him, her hand closing around the fluted blade, with care, though not enough, as Rumplestiltskin saw her wince. He had to give her credit though, it did not deter her and when she withdrew her hand. She held the dagger gingerly, still by the blade, and then turning to him, offered him the hilt. “There.”

He rolled his eyes, and though it pained him to have to admit it, in this case his next words had never been more true. “It’s no good to me. Not here.”

“Then what…?” Belle asked, shifting her gaze between him and the dagger.

“Loopholes, dearie,” he sang. “Just hold it up… good. Now, repeat after me…”

He tried not to tense as he watched Belle raise the dagger, this time holding it by the hilt, and repeated his words exactly, and with almost the same intonation as he had used in _very_ carefully ensuring just the right wording to achieve the desired result by compulsion.

His muscles stretched and strained, and he growled like an angry tiger as he pulled and twisted, cracking wood - and he was sure a few bones as well, judging from the pain - as he tore himself free of the confining wood, finally shaking away the last of the wood chips as he stumbled toward where Belle stood, staring at him in horror.

He both covered the stumble, and retrieved his dagger from Belle’s hand at one and the same time, with a brisk, “I’ll take that!” before summoning his magic once again to aparate the both of them out of the table, and back into the Great Hall of the Dark Castle.

Rumplestiltskin breathed a sigh of relief, but allowed himself only a moment before he turned to Belle and as though they had just returned from a brisk walk in the out of doors, said, “Well, that was a bit of a mess. Could all have been avoided if you’d have read the inscription to me.”

As he spoke he snatched the goblet from the dusty mantle piece and held it out to Belle, waving a hand over it to fill the bottom of it with the sweetest nectar.

“I said before—” she began to argue, but he cut her off.

“Uh uh uh!” He held the goblet out to her expectation written on his face. “For your part in it all, you’ll _share_ my fate, this geas those twittering idiots tricked me into.”

“I will n—”

“After all, there’s no telling how long I might get snatched away for the _next_ time.”

“What do you mean, ‘the next time?’” Belle asked, her gaze shifting between the goblet and his face as she asked.

“Don’t you know, dearie,” he waggled the goblet in her direction and waited while she took it gingerly, and began to run her eyes over the fairy script.

* * *

Belle carefully translated every word of the spell that lay upon the goblet… each word filling her with greater and greater worry. The fairies had created a curse - of sorts - wherein Rumple would be thrown, literally, through realm, and time, and space into another existence… his only hope for salvation; for return to his own realm - their realm - to right a wrong that happened in whatever time and place he found himself.

What frightened her more than anything was the dawning realization that, by sharing his fate, _she_ would be the keeper of the key.

She swallowed hard, still cupping the goblet in her hand, staring into the liquid at the bottom of the cup, indecisive.

“What about _him?_ ” she said, stalling for more time, gesturing to the coffee table.

“Well, I can’t let him go,” Rumple said, as if he were stating the blatantly obvious. “There’s no telling what mischief he’d get up to; the trouble he’d cause.”

“You can’t just _leave_ him like that,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked, his tone perplexed.

“Won’t he be missed?”

“They already think he’s dead… in his time, I mean,” he said. “Returning him now would perpetuate his already over inflated image.”

“But—”

Rumplestiltskin shook his head, and Belle fell silent, then sighed.

“No buts, Belle,” he said, and his tone was almost gentle. “Some things—”

This time it was Belle’s turn to interrupt. “No. You send him back, or I won’t drink.”

She held out the goblet in his direction as though to return it.

Rumplestiltskin sighed, shook his head, and rolled his eyes, and Belle allowed herself to be distracted by his theatrics, never once considering that she had just left him an enormous loophole.

“Very well,” he said at last. “Consider it a deal.”

She watched as he waved his hand, and the table disappeared in a plume of purple smoke, and then he stepped into the space it previously occupied.

“Now drink,” he commanded, and his tone was icy. Belle knew better than to disobey.

* * *

In a room in the Netherwood Residential Hotel in Hastings, a space previously empty, in the bright light of a bay window space, an ornately decorated, low standing coffee table stood alone. Its once varnished sheen was faded, and the table’s top was strewn with the paraphernalia of one addicted to heroin.

When the room’s occupant seemed never to return, and to have absconded without paying his rent, fearing the man he knew the occupant to be, the proprietor gathered the former residents things, and burned them all to cinders and ash in the hotel’s furnace, having a care to, thereafter, fully cleanse and salt the furnace before returning it to its former operation.

The ashes he stored carefully in a lead lined box, and shipped to his brother, an undertaker in Brighton, where they remained until, with the passage of time, _somehow_ they were lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Of Aleister Crowley (The Beast), the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has the following to say:
> 
> “On 1 December 1947, at Netherwood, a residential hotel in The Ridge, Hastings, Crowley, by this time a chronic heroin addict, died of bronchitis and heart congestion. His remains were cremated at Brighton and reportedly have been lost.”


End file.
